Towards Better Futures: Sustainability and Innovation

Abstract: The smart city is one of the many new political, social, and economic transformations of this contemporary world. The smart city is a vision, and a mode of urban planning that makes use of large-scale and ubiquitous technologies to algorithmically govern city services and flows to drive efficiency gains. The concept is produced according to prevalent framings of sustainability and instrumentalist logics which underpin dominant policy approaches to urban resilience. This way of knowing has privileged science and technology for centuries, and Aristotle’s third intellectual virtue, phronesis (ethics) has all but disappeared from modern language. A consideration of practical wisdom and skill may help reinvent current ontologies and draws our attention to social practices and the intelligibilities of subjects. This research seeks to apply a phronetic approach to researching the smart city, which can potentially contribute richer understandings and contextualisations of how the concept is promoted, produced and translated by smart city actors and how the practices and goals of sustainability are affected as a result. This methodological approach engenders a renewed consideration of research methods and explorations of how best to research social practices, intelligibilities, and ways of knowing and doing in a predominantly scientific and technological world.

Abstract: Community-based programmes are often used in the prevention and management of non-communicable diseases. However, these programmes may be useful only insofar as they can be scaled up and sustained in some meaningful way. Social network analysis – the structural relationships between individuals or organizations – may serve as an important tool to this process.

This research is a mixed-methods process evaluation with the broad aim of understanding the role of network research in scaling and sustaining community health programmes. It uses a South African government-run healthy lifestyles initiative as a case study. The evaluation was made up of four parts: a feasibility study, a scoping review, a social network analysis survey, and an interview sense-making phase. The evaluation found that, in practice, social network analysis can be difficult to implement in complex systems such as community programmes. It also found that while some aspects of the research, such as the visual outputs of analysis, were useful to programme participants, other analyses did not serve stakeholders in “the real world”. The interview phase of the research has brought up interesting ideas of how to harness the positive outcomes of network analysis while making it more practical and useful for complex community programmes.

Abstract:  Whilst Environmental History is an established academic field, it has made little progress within the teaching of History in secondary schools in the UK. In this paper, I will discuss how and why this should change by offering and justifying methods of bridging the gap between academic approaches to Environmental History and secondary school history teaching and learning contexts. Five topics have been chosen that have links to academic literature in the field of Environmental History and which are already commonly taught in UK secondary schools, so as to provide practical and usable suggestions. These topics are: the Black Death, the British Empire, the Industrial Revolution, World War One and the Holocaust. One obvious barrier to secondary school teachers attributing value to an Environmental History approach is time constraints. In practice, however, an environmental approach need not be an addition to our current curriculum, so much as adjustment of focus, which reflects the approach of leading Environmental History academics. Fundamentally, the disconnect between approaches to History in Higher Education and in secondary education needs to be urgently addressed; we are living in a changing world faced with increasing numbers of ‘Wicked’ problems. Secondary school students should understand History’s role in addressing these issues before they reach university, by learning History that matters. Teachers should be supported and prepared to teach such histories. This paper will suggest how this can be achieved by providing usable suggestions for practice and suggestions for both initial and continuing teacher education more broadly.